Apparatuses and methods of manufacturing a group-III nitride semiconductor layer made of, for example, a nitride compound semiconductor crystal using a reactive sputtering method have been proposed.
The reactive sputtering method according to the related art sputters a target including a group-III element, such as Ga or Al, generates the plasma of reactive gas including a nitrogen element, such as nitrogen, in a chamber of a sputtering apparatus, and reacts the group-III element with the reactive gas to form a group-III nitride semiconductor layer.
Specifically, for example, a method has been proposed which forms GaN layers on the (100) plane of Si and the (0001) plane of sapphire (Al2O3) by an RF magnetron sputtering method using N2 gas (for example, see Non-Patent Document 1).
[Non-Patent Document 1] Y. USHIKU, et al., “Proceedings of the 21st Century Combined Symposium”, Vol. 2, p 295 (2003)